Those of us on the vendor side of the IT business can sometimes despair.
All the great technology we work so hard to bring to market meets the stark reality of IT organizations unprepared to leverage what the technology can now do.
But, within the gloom, I occasionally get to meet a customer who is reasonably prepared to move forward to the next logical step in their journey.
And it gives me hope that we as vendors might be doing a few things right after all :-)
From time to time, various vendors attempt to combine the best of the two most popular storage access models in our industry: block (presumably on FC, iSCSI or FCoE) and file (most always on ethernet/IP).
Historians of our industry can point to many brave but ultimately unsuccessful attempts to combine the inherent simplicity and ease-of-management of NFS with the performance and availability attributes of SAN.
Many of us have been tracking the progress of pNFS in this regard, and it looks like the time is nearing when customers can seriously consider enterprise-class implementations of this converged access model.
The big question in everyone's mind: will it permanently blur the lines between file and block access?
If you're a frequent reader, you know that I use a lot of my customer experiences as fodder for themes in this blog. Usually, it's about a customer or partner aspiring to do things better.
Well, the world isn't entirely made up of aspirational individuals. And, as a result, occasionally I get into customer situations where it's a more of a bare-knuckle agenda.
And, since it's Friday, I thought I'd share one of those stories.
One of the benefits of frequent customer interaction is that you get to spot rising -- and sometimes declining -- customer interest in various topics.
Object storage has been around for a while -- a few people understand it, but many don't. And in the last few weeks, I've found myself getting into an object storage discussion with customers without really intending to.
And the ways we get there are interesting as well ...
As the industry consolidates and standardizes, we as vendors are getting far more comfortable in the new world of co-opetion with other vendors: a nuanced world where we cooperate in some areas, and compete with others.
No longer can various inter-vendor relationships be easily and exclusively categorized as either "friend" or "foe" -- the answer is usually mix of both, with customers giving as strong input on where we need to cooperate, and where they'll encourage a little friendly competition.
Many of the customers I work with are getting more comfortable in this new landscape as well. They're learning to look beyond the press releases and brochures to figure out how well various vendors are working together -- or not -- as the case might be.
And I think the relationship between EMC and Oracle is an excellent case study in how these dynamics can result in better outcomes for everyone: customers *and* vendors.
The data is mounting: more people are turning to EMC for their VMware deployments than anyone else.
Whether it's storage, data protection, security or management -- they're obviously voting with with their dollars, putting EMC in the enviable #1 position in supporting the de-facto standard for virtualization.
While some are still quibbling over the data, others are asking a more pertinent question: why?
So, I thought I'd share with you the 10 reasons I think are driving this strong preference for EMC from IT organizations large and small.
Working as I do at EMC, I get the opportunity to work with some of the world's best partners, including Dimension Data. Recently acquired by NTT, they're in an interesting position to do well as the world shifts from traditional IT to newer models.
I was recently asked to contribute a thought piece for a new customer publication they're creating. They asked the questions, I gave my best answers.
Graciously, they allowed me to post the piece here in advance of their publication. I'll supply a link when it gets published -- the publication shows every sign of being a good and valuable read.
In previous blog posts, I've discussed in some length how EMC's own IT organization is progressing in their journey to the private cloud, running through the phases we're using as a reference model.
Well, progress appears to be a bit ahead of schedule. Serious planning work is now being done to offer a broad range of IT-as-a-service to the EMC organization. And I think there are some useful insights for everyone here.
Full disclaimer: these slides are freshly pilfered from Sanjay Mirchandani, EMC's CIO. Sanjay likes to give me a tough time that I steal all his material. Sanjay, I'm not actually stealing your slides -- I'm only just liberating them. Rest assured, I only steal from the best :-)
Chuck Hollis VP -- Global Marketing CTO EMC Corporation @chuckhollis
Chuck has been with EMC for 17 years, most of them great.
He enjoys speaking to customer and industry audiences about a variety of technology topics, and -- of course -- enjoys blogging.
He lives in Holliston, MA with his wife, three kids and four dogs when he's not travelling. In his spare time, Chuck is working on his second career as an aging rock musician.
Warning: do not buy him a drink when there is a piano nearby.
I try and write something new 1-2 times per week; less if I'm travelling, more if I'm in the office. Hopefully you'll find the frequency about right!
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